How Organizations Around the World Deployed XenDesktop with Ease in 2011 using Sanbolic Melio

For my first post of the new year, I wanted to provide a brief synopsis of what Citrix XenDesktop customers were able to achieve in 2011 using Sanbolic’sMelio Distributed Data Management software.

Hundreds of Citrix customers throughout the world got started with XenDesktop Pilots/PoCs very quickly (within days, not weeks or months), with less effort and with lower upfront cost.

After completing successful Pilots/PoCs, customers moved their virtual desktop infrastructures into production while users were working on their virtual desktops.

Many customers that conducted their XenDesktop Pilots/PoCs on Hyper-V stayed with Hyper-V when they moved their virtual desktop infrastructures into production.

As customers began realizing the benefits of VDI, they expanded their infrastructures seamlessly to achieve the benefits of desktop virtualization on a larger scale, providing them with a much greater return on their investments in XenDesktop.

How?

They used Sanbolic Melio to create flexible pools of highly available shared storage from drives installed in industry-standard servers to store desktop images, virtual machines and SQL databases for their Pilots/PoCs.

They leveraged the unique benefits of Melio to deploy XenDesktop in their production environments using the same servers and storage they used for their Pilots/PoCs.

They continued to take advantage of the enterprise-class features (i.e., cluster-wide data protection, dynamic volume expansion, live migration of VMs and storage, QoS, etc.) provided by the combination of Hyper-V and Melio when they moved their virtual desktop infrastructures into production.

They took advantage of Melio’s extensive capabilities, including live storage/data migration and dynamic volume expansion, to scale their virtual desktop infrastructures quickly and easily, without any system downtime.

Looking ahead…

Sanbolic will continue to help Citrix customers realize the fastest and greatest return on their investments in XenDesktop by:

Introducing the latest version of its SQL Server HA solution – AppCluster R2, which provides high availability for XenDesktop and PVS databases.

Further enhancing Melio’s innate mirroring capabilities to allow customers to use the disks within their commodity server hardware to create a low-cost shared storage solution for PVS and Hyper-V.

Offering a cost-effective DR solution that enables both active/active and active/passive configurations for XenDesktop across geographically dispersed sites.